Not even close. I forgot which one gnome-shell is exactly, but the GNOME 3 fallback is broken with VirtualBox seamless mode, and the GNOME 2 (or was it GNOME3-pretending-to-be-GNOME2?) fallback has by default an entirely messed up panel.

It's easy to waste a day trying all these alternatives to get something that works. I don't call that an easy-to-use distro. Particularly as it's a regression.

That's the fallback from GNOME.

The old "classic" panel look has been deprecated upstream, it doesn't really exist any more so I don't know what you're expecting Ubuntu to do in this case.

I'd suggest 'panel people' have a look at Xubuntu.

I don't expect Canonical to do anything, but I'd like them to include the Xubuntu desktop packages in the long term release support cycle as an option for users.

Xubuntu and Xfce is fine, but it's still a regression from gnome2 in allot of ways.

It doesn't group windows on the panel as well as gnome 2 does.

You lose allot of the nice easy features from gnome2 for doing things like using shared files or printers from windows computers.

The panel is allot less flexible and harder to configure. There are also less panel applets available.

Mouse-button back doesn't work in several parts of the interface.

I'm sure there are workarounds for many of these issues but for an out of the box experience it is still a regression.

Ever since I switched to xfce, I've got some really annoying bugs too:

* Key bindings for switching keyboard layouts don't persist, I have to reconfigure them every time I reboot or X restarts

* Auto-suspend when lid is closed no longer works reliably. I sometimes find a really hot laptop in my bag after a while.

That said, XFce is much nicer than Unity.

It is, no doubt but it's not really something you can switch to to get your gnome2 back.

If I had more free time I would love to contribute to something like Xfce (or E17) and turn them into a first class Desktop Environment.

That's the spirit. I suspect that the XFCE project will get far more support now if only from individuals scratching their itches.

I tried to use gnome-shell for a few days and my experience was not quite this.

The task switching interface is very much inferior to gnome2. In gnome2 I can setup some panels which span the bottom of both my monitors , giving me loads of space to switch tasks conveniently and have the panel group together similar apps to save space. I then have another panel with a set of shortcuts that I can use to launch my most common apps.

With gnome-shell you are stuck with having 1 "dock" panel on the far left of 1 monitor to switch apps, even though apps are grouped this makes it far less convenient to switch between them. Instead of 1 click to switch, it's press a button , scan the mouse to the far left then click and then usually click again for the window I want.

The big problem however is this, some of the apps I use are launched from shell scripts which will do something and then run some Java or python app. This is the way with many apps that are not installable through apt-get. IntelliJ IDEA is an example of this.

What I do in gnome2 is just create a new launcher that points to the script and add it to the panel, problem solved.

Now with gnome shell or unity , I can run my script from the terminal which will then cause the app to launch. However now when I want to dock the app for easy launch later it just won't let me.

This is probably because it doesn't understand the relationship between the shell script I ran and what it sees as the "application" and since there is nowhere else I can really put the app I am now relegated to having to launch some of my apps through the terminal each time because they cannot be docked into the main dock with the rest of my apps.